Are there any truly revolutionary inventions / discoveries?

Great Debates
1

I’ve been mostly-lurking for quite a while and I don’t remember this subject coming up before. If it has been done to death already, please be gentle…

A few months ago there was a thread about what the world would look like if the Wright brothers had not invented the airplane. It was quickly pointed out that the world would look pretty much the same, as several different groups of people were very close to achieving the same thing at roughly the same time. If the brothers had failed, manned flight would have been set back by a couple of years at the most.

Looking at many other inventions and discoveries thoughout history which appear revolutionary at first sight, I see the same thing. Newton and Leibniz each developed calculus independently, within a few years of each other. Darwin came up with natural selection by himself (the concepts of evolution and speciation already existed), but had to rush his work into print when he learned that Wallace had done pretty much the same thing on his own. James Watt is credited as the inventor of the steam engine, but in fact he only made a small, though significant, improvement – the development of the steam engine was a relatively smooth evolutionary path that can be traced back to Hero of Alexandria in 300BC.

According to Cecil, even the archetypal flash-of-inspiration style invention, the weel, was actually developed over thousands of years in a slow, gradual process.

Without wanting to deprecate the achievements of Newton, the Wright brothers or any other great inventor or scientist, the evidence seems to suggest that, once “the time is right” for a given development, it is going to happen one way or another. If inventor X had been hit by a bus on the eve of publishing his great discovery, inventor Y or Z would have come up with the same thing in less than a decade and history would have been pretty much the same.

The most obvious exception I can think of is Einstein’s theory of relativity. While I suspect that this, too, was partly a matter of “the time being ripe” following the work of Planck et al, I don’t know of anybody claiming to have been working on the same thing at the same time. Any other counter-examples?

This concept could be relevant in discussions of patent law. If it is true that most inventions are more or less inevitable once the necessary pre-conditions are in place, and that people independently coming up with the same thing is the norm rather than the exception, that would undermine the legitimacy of granting a monopoly on the invention to the person who happens to be the first to go public with it.

Comments?

2

Shockley’s semiconductor.

Einstein’s Theories…

The Altair, the first hobbist computer.

Ford’s decision to pay a five dollar wage so his employees could buy the cars they made.

Yeah, anything can be invented… again. But it’s ideas and concepts that come once in a lifetime.

3

Small nitpick. Planck’s work in QM had little, if anything, to do with Einstein’s theory or Relativity. But you’re right-- it’s unclear how long it would’ve taken for someone else to figure it out.

4

True, they only come up once in a lifetime, and when they do they are indeed revolutionary and the people who come up with them are rightly regarded as geniuses. But my point is that there appear to be very few cases where, if it wasn’t for some specific individual, a given development would not have happened until a long time afterward.

A group of German physicists working at Westinghouse Laboratory in Paris developed the transistor independently, less than two months after Shockley and friends did. The Altair was a very important step in the growing of the hobby computer market, but it did not create that market; it came out in a time when the idea of do-it-yourself microcomputers was already a hot item among electronics enthusiasts.

Ford is an interesting case, thanks. Did he really create a revolutionary new concept in economics, or was he in the front of a movement that had already started? Any historians of economy care to comment?

5

You’re right; I guess I was thinking of Maxwell. Einstein also extended Planck’s work, but that was independent of Relativity.

So, could the theory of relativity have been discovered right after Maxwell’s publication of his treatises on light, magnetism and electricity, if Einstein had been born earlier? What I’m getting at is, how long did it take from the moment when all the pieces of the puzzle were available, until somebody picked them up and put them together?

6

Relativity is a tough question because there is so little observable phenomena that lead you to it. IIRC, Michelson and Morely (sp?) had tried to measure the so-called “ether wind” by measuring the speed of light in different reference frames. They kept getting the same value for “c”. Einstein’s genius was to take the data a t face value (w/o preconceptions) and say “what would be the implications if the speed of light were constant in all reference frames”. I don’t know of anyone else thinking along those lines at the time, but surely Relativity would’ve been thought up in the first half of the 20th century as measurement techniques consistently showed that “c” is invariant wrt reference frames.

7

I’m not sure your examples prove your point. It’s true that many things were developed by more than a single individual. But I’m not sure this implies that they were inevitable. Take the 5 or even 10 people working on these things out of the picture and the situation might be quite different. Wan’t it Newton who is quoted with the famous line about seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants?

The truth, I think, lies somewhere in between. Especially when you only look at discoveries, the essential materials for them have existed for all time. If you limit the search to ideas that work a similar phenomena can be seen. That is, paying workers more might have been a good idea since the invention of money.

My point is that while inventions and discoveries may be inevitable in the sense that they are true, they are not inevitiable in the sense that if no individuals were (obsessively some times) seeking them they would still have been invented or discovered.

8

I think that when manape first discovered that they could use their environment for tools, that was more or less revolutionary.

(I mean if it was not for this, Napoleon would of never crossed the Deleware!)

9

Damn Monoliths!

10

pervert: sure, if you take away all of the different individuals or groups who are at the top of a given field at a given time, things change. I’m not claiming that all progress is predetermined and inevitable.

For example, the Chinese discovered gunpowder before the West did, but then failed to go on and develop pistols. I suggest that this is not because the person who was destined to invent the firearm fell into a well before he (or she) could do so, but because the social / cultural conditions at the time were not right to produce such an inventor. Had the conditions been right, they would probably have produced several such people around the same time, and it would mostly have been a matter of change which one of them would have gone down in history as the inventor of the firearm.

Once the giants were in place, anybody who happened to be a world-class genius could climb their shoulders, and Newton was the first by a narrow margin. The giants, in turn, are standing on top of other giants and no single giant is irreplaceable. My point is that we tend to underestimate the importance of the giants, and focus too much on the guy on top. And that the common statement that "if it wasn’t for X, we would not have Y is usually incorrect.

I agree that Henry Ford is an interesting counter-example; there seems to be no reason why the same things could not have been done centuries earlier.

11

That’s a matter of chance, not a matter of change.

12

Well, I agree that we tend to forget about the giants of the past. But when we praise more recent giants, we are doing just that. Praising people of our generation (or close to it) for having become giants. We certainly should recognize others for their contributions. But this may be more of a general disinterest in history than any sort of refusal to recognize the resources which allowed an individual to make his contribution.

I agree with your gunpoweder story in that social / cultural conditions will influence the number of people likely to discover or invent new things. That’s why I suggested that the existence of other paths might not be a reason to rethink the philosophy behind patents. I tend to think that they encourage rather than discourage innovation.

You might simply be able to tranlate the “if it wasn’t for X, we would not have Y” sentence to “We have X to thank for Y”.

I think that most things could have been discovered earlier. Did we not “rediscover” many things the greeks had discovered? Henry Ford’s story may simply be one of some of his odd ideas coming together at the right time. We all know, don’t we, that his unusual wages were not simple social welfare? He required workers to go through some odd inspections to qualify for those wages. I remember reading that a plant representative inspected homes of hopefuls to make sure they were living a “good family” life.

13

I shall try to write in my Aldebaran-English some info on Ford, because he really is worth to be mentioned here.

Ford followed the idea’s and principles of Taylor.
His contribution to the developing of the industrial organisation of production is his central role in the development of the automobile as a mass product, which is a symbol par excellence of the social development towards the industrial society.

The greatest renovation of Ford and his engineers was the application on a large scale of the assembly line production.
That wasn’t such a new principle, since the slaughterhouses of Chicago had already experience with it.
But Ford was the first one to handle it as basics for a complete reorganisation of the production organisation. (I can fo in more detail how they came to a working result but we all know how it works in practice I guess).
Thus the production process became one great organic unite (the humans involved included).
From this point of view one could say that the system of Ford can be seen as the completion and perfection of Taylor’s organisation model.
Ford simplified with this at the same time the control over the behaviour of the workers: personal observation became - because of the automatism of the assembly line - for the greatest part superfluous as the assembly line dictates the tempo of the work.

Very soon a weakness of the system that demanded a lot from the workers surfaced because of the very high wastage of the personnel. This was in 1913 about 400% and demonstrated clearly that the absence or malfunctioning of one link affects the functioning of the whole chain. Production became under threat because of under manning and/or insufficiently trained or motivated workers and formed thus an enormous risk.
The solution of Ford for this problem was hardly less revolutionary then the introduction of the assembly line.
Begin 1914 he announced a remarkable rise in wages (5$/day for suitable workers) that immediately had an enormous success on employment potential.
There was however an other side to the coin: day wages stayed at 2,5$/day, the rest was a bonus which wasn’t paid automatically to everyone.
In fact he used that bonus to select those workers who were the most suitable in his eyes. His preference went to married men with family responsibilities because he counted on it that they wouldn’t risk that easy their good position at his factory.
Of young unmarried men one could expect less loyalty to the company. They thus didn’t get the bonus. The same counted for workers Ford saw as problematic cases or unwanted elements. It seems that he went very far to identify such workers. It is known that he created a department which task it was to provide for dossiers about the private life of all his workers.
This system of rewarding (he also introduced a system of cheap loans for workers who wanted to buy a house) was something completely new and separates Ford from Taylor (and related).
Ford was the first to come to the insight that one needs to bind also a part of the common workers to the company.
He was also the one of the first entrepreneurs who came to the conclusion that raising of the purchasing power in the end must lead to the benefit of the entrepreneur and that mass production is unseparatable connected with mass consumption.

Sociologists later began to use the term “Fordism” for the socio-economical system by witch the link between mass production and mass consumption becomes guaranteed via strong worker unions , social security and a “Kenyan” macro-economic policy aimed on preservation of purchasing power also in periods of downward economic trend.

Salaam. A

14

I once read in a Richard Shenkman book that Ford implemented the $5-a-day wage plan not out of any humanitarian interests but out of the sheer necessity of keeping workforce turnover low, since the new assembly line mode of manufacture increased employees’ workloads to such extents that Ford had to pay his workers more just to keep them from quitting.

15

Oh, I’m certainly not saying that Newton, the Wright brothers et al, do not deserve praise for their accomplishments. They were geniuses, and the fact that two or three other geniuses may have been working on the same thing does nothing to detract from that. In fact, it heightens my admiration for them, because it suggests that rather than having a lucky stroke of inspiration and happening to be at the right place and time, these are people who would have risen to the top of their chosen field no matter what the circumstances were.

However, in my mind it does have consequences for the patent issue. If inventions are more-or-less inevitable once the preconditions are in place, and independent reinvention is much more likely than we realise, then what justification or necessity is there to grant a 20-year monopoly to the guy who happens to be first? Others will be around soon enough, and the first one to actually turn the idea into a marketable product will be rewarded automatically.

True, the patent is still valuable as an incentive, and as such it could add to the existance of a culture in which inventors exist and discoveries happen. But if the assumptions on which the patent system is based (that inventions are rare and unique, and inventors must be rewarded for not taking their ideas with them into the grave) are incorrent, is it worth it? At least, maybe there should be a way to deal with situations where the runner-ups can prove that they came up with the invention independently?

16

I’m not sure the idea that inventions are rare an unique is integral to the ideas of patents. And if I’m not mistaken there are provisions if a “runner up” can prove that he invented the same thing independantly.

The point is that inventions are not “more-or-less inevitable”. They may not be created entirely from atomic particles by the inventor, but the inventor certainly creates something when he invents a new thing. Since it is his creation, he should have some rights of ownership. I think the patent system has much more to do with this than the idea that inventors acted on their own.

17

Thanks, Aldebaran and Lady Eboshi!

Hmm, so maybe even Henry Ford’s revolutionary ideas were a product of their time. The automobile was a far more complex product to mass-produce than anything that had come before it, and because of that it was no longer possible to treat assembly-line workers as interchangeable parts. Hence the pay raises.

That some of the workers may eventually become rich enough to become customers themselves is a nice bonus, but would not have been enough reason in itself for Ford’s apparent generosity. After all, paying people more than you need to pay them and then hoping to get some of that money back from them later, in exchange for cars, would seem rather inefficient. Why not just keep the money in the first place?

So, it is at least possible that the pay raises were a natural (inevitable?) response to the need for a more skilled workforce. And that Ford, had he been born 200 years earlier, would not have done the same thing because the time was not yet ripe for it, although he may well have gone down in history for some other impressive feat.

18

The only truly revolutionary dicovery I can think of is Penicillin. That more or less came out of nowhere.

19

pervert: Fair enough. If the goal of patent law is not to reward inventors for publicizing their work, but to encourage them to spend time on developing that work in the first place, then my point about inventors not working in a vacuum is not an argument against that system.

While I came up with this issue while thinking about patents, I am more interested in the question of whether it is true at all, and if there are any interesting counter-examples.

In fact, I just thought of a possible counter-example myself: hot-air balloons. They don’t really depend on a lot of prior science or technology, so why were they not invented earlier? I can imagine a pre-historic farmer noticing dry leaves being blown upwards in the hot air above a camp-fire, and building a prototype with a leather balloon. Or am I underestimating the difficulty? Is there a reason why we had to wait for the Montgolfier brothers in 1783 to build the first balloon, and might we have had to wait for several more centuries if they had found themselves another hobby?

20

Good one. I can’t think of any reason why that discovery could not have been made almost a century earlier, and without Fleming’s accidental discovery it might never have happened. In fact, John Tyndall remarked on the fact that mold kills bacteria in 1876, but apparently did not think of the medical applications of that fact, and even after Fleming it came close to being forgotten again for another ten years.

By the way, I’m starting to think that ‘revolutionary’ is not quite the word I was looking for. Almost all of the examples mentioned in this thread were revolutionary in the sense that they suddenly changed the world, but I’m looking for things that would not have happened if it wasn’t for the work of one particular person or group. Can anybody think of a better term?